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Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity and the Economy of the Text by S. Shankar. Reprinted by permission of the State University of New York Press ©2001, State University of New York. All rights reserved. In Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), Richard Wright turns his attention to a dimension of the diasporic black experience that he had not previously explored in any great detail. What, Black Power asks, sometimes explicitly and always implicitly, is the relationship of Richard Wright, this black man of the diaspora, to Africa? Black Power is an account of Wright’s journey to the Gold Coast during the summer of 1953, four years before the achievement of independence by that country.2 During his stay in the Gold Coast, Wright not only witnesses first hand the activities of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party as it campaigns for the achievement of full independence, but also explores (as the subtitle to the book suggests) his “reactions” to Africa.3 Wright’s title to his book acquires a special resonance for readers who come to the travel narrative after the Sixties when the Black Power movement of which Kwame Touré was a part gave the term popular currency. I have found no evidence linking Wright’s use of the term directly with that of the movement of the Sixties. Wright’s text, of course, predates the Black Power movement by more than a decade. Richard Wright’s Black Power Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative1 S. Shankar 3 It is interesting to note the nationalist overtones of the Black Power movement of the Sixties in this context and to remark that, perhaps independently, the same phrase is applied to the nationalist aspirations of two different black populations. What this correspondence suggests is the continuity of language and historical vision in the African-American political tradition. Indeed, as C. L. R. James asserted in his essay on Kwame Touré entitled “Black Power”: “Stokely [Kwame Touré] and the advocates of Black Power stand on the shoulders of all that has gone before . . . . [T]oo many people see Black Power and its advocates as some sort of portent, a sudden apparition. . . . It is nothing of the kind. It represents the high peak of thought on the Negro question which has been going on for over half a century” (367). What links together the two uses of the same phrase, then, is the complex political ferment in the black world from Marcus Garvey to Nelson Mandela . Recognizing the resonances of the phrase “Black Power” in this fashion allows us to place Wright’s travelogue within the context of this political tradition. Black Power is a travel narrative and it is with reference to this generic identity of the text, too, that I want to carry out my explorations of Black Power in this essay . In discussing the text here, I am interested in posing certain questions regarding the discursive economy of Wright’s text as a travel narrative written in the colonial context. Elsewhere, I explore in some detail the implications of the term “economy” as it is applicable to texts, but it may be useful to make some schematic points here about the term.4 What is an economy? As I use the term here, it refers to a systemic operation through which value is produced and distributed between the different elements that go to make up the system. The term “value” is of central importance to an understanding of “economy.” “Value” and “economy” go together as terms. If we were to use a spatial metaphor, and it is only a metaphor, we might call an “economy” a hierarchical structure which is also a machine for producing and concentrating value at specific sites. I believe the term “economy” can be usefully applied to a text (such as a written narrative) so as to illuminate the functioning of the text in new ways. I make this assertion to foreground the ways in which a text operates as a mechanism for the production and distribution of a certain kind of “value.” If we learn to regard the text as an economy, we are able to discern the materialist ways in which the text assigns value selectively, that is, to note how the value-codings of the text have their origins outside the text. This argument cannot be further explored here. Suf- fice it to note that value signifies plenitude or fullness. With reference to...

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